PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits

Hang Jiang, Xiajie Zhang, Xubo Cao, Cynthia Breazeal, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara


Abstract
Despite the many use cases for large language models (LLMs) in creating personalized chatbots, there has been limited research on evaluating the extent to which the behaviors of personalized LLMs accurately and consistently reflect specific personality traits. We consider studying the behavior of LLM-based agents which we refer to as LLM personas and present a case study with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to investigate whether LLMs can generate content that aligns with their assigned personality profiles. To this end, we simulate distinct LLM personas based on the Big Five personality model, have them complete the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality test and a story writing task, and then assess their essays with automatic and human evaluations. Results show that LLM personas’ self-reported BFI scores are consistent with their designated personality types, with large effect sizes observed across five traits. Additionally, LLM personas’ writings have emerging representative linguistic patterns for personality traits when compared with a human writing corpus. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that humans can perceive some personality traits with an accuracy of up to 80%. Interestingly, the accuracy drops significantly when the annotators were informed of AI authorship.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.229
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3605–3627
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.229
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.229
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hang Jiang, Xiajie Zhang, Xubo Cao, Cynthia Breazeal, Deb Roy, and Jad Kabbara. 2024. PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 3605–3627, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits (Jiang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.229.pdf